At the team meeting, Ryan had difficulty describing the Chiefs as a formidable offensive opponent; they’d scored two touchdowns in their last five games. So instead he talked at length about the Chiefs linebacker Tamba Hali, one of the game’s “premier players.” Ryan really did admire Hali. He also enjoyed saying “Tamba Hali,” making the name sound a little like “Timber!” It was, Ryan thought, a perfect football name.
The defense was never as giddy in the meeting room after a win as it was glum following a loss. That Scott had played well, however, restored his wit. At one point he began describing himself as “an old-ass Toyota Camry. A hundred and thirty-seven thousand miles on me. Dead carburetor.”
Then came the last padded practice of year. Revis, too, was in revived spirits. He threw a ball at Mo Wilkerson and then hid behind some other players. Later he performed a hilarious spoof of DT driving along in his BMW sports car, singing a song, happy and free of care, until he encountered an SUV in his facility parking space, which ruined his day.
At safety, Brodney Pool and Jim Leonhard were playing their best football of the year. Pool was a safety because nothing made him anxious. Leonhard was a safety because everything made him wary.
Sanchez arrived at the Thursday quarterbacks’ meeting carrying treats from Starbucks. “What did you get the rest of us?” Schotty asked him. “No I in team!”
Sanchez smiled. “There is in win.”
“Wife’s coming in tonight, men,” Schotty continued. “Be out of here at seven. You figure out the money zone on your own!” Schotty, it turned out, had gotten some sleep.
Afterward, out in the hallway, Sanchez beckoned to me with a conspiratorial gesture. I walked over. He showed me the hand-warmer he wore at his belt during practice. It looked like a two-sided tube pocket but was, in fact, Mr. Sanchez’s Cabinet of Wonders. From it he proceeded to extract ChapStick, cough drops, tissues, cold medicine, nasal spray, vitamins, pens, a spare electric cord, and small, disposable hand-warming devices. “Resourceful, huh?” he said, with a raised eyebrow.
Football players carried all sorts of things on their persons. Things they kept in their helmets while playing: ChapStick, inspirational sayings, photographs of loved ones, swatches of wool (for warmth).
Walking down the hall, Schotty said of the newspapers that continued to rake him, “You haven’t made it as a coordinator until you got killed and they’re calling for your job.”
Later I ran into Callahan. The offensive line hadn’t allowed a sack in the two weeks since Ryan had told each of the players that he needed more. Callahan was thinking ahead. He divided football seasons into four-game blocks. There was now only one of those seasonal quarters remaining. “It goes fast, doesn’t it?” he said.
With the days and the season waning, many people were feeling nostalgic. Devlin said that more than playing football, he missed the friendship—the locker room and the practice sideline. “The jokes, the funny stories, the camaraderie. That’s what I miss.” Wayne Hunter was anticipating identical regret. “I can already see myself missing the locker room,” the tackle said. “What other job can you have and be with men all day just talking?”
At the defensive meeting, Pettine projected on the screen a photograph of a youthful Bart Scott in Jheri curls. “I used to be a pimp,” Scott told everyone.
Smitty had been training hard, losing weight, getting fit. “How does it look to be coaching these guys, they’re running around, and their coach is huffing and puffing after them?” he said. “You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse every day. Nobody stays the same.”
Out at practice, Leonhard made a flurry of picks. On the sideline, Sione Po’uha discussed the biography of Steve Jobs he’d been reading. Once he’d established that I, too, liked to read, Po’uha had been giving me enthusiastic reports over the past couple of weeks. Now he was turning against Jobs. “I think of Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison as anchors,” Po’uha explained. “Jobs was a buoy. He floated along with the times. When there was a storm, he might go under. Not strongly anchored.”
That afternoon, Pettine was melancholy. Smitty had gotten a remunerative offer to coach at Washington State, where his old college head coach Mike Leach had been hired. Smitty earned an entry-level Jets coaching salary and was doing a position coach’s job as well as his quality-control work. Pettine was pretty sure some of the younger coaches also planned to leave at year’s end and he blamed Jeff Weeks. Weeks made more money than three junior coaches combined. Pettine could have let it slide, except that just wasn’t in him. He said he knew the grass wasn’t necessarily greener anywhere else, and he knew that he probably ought to be more political, yet in matters like this, he didn’t want to be. He was likewise aware how it might appear to others, that his aversion to Weeks had to do with his and Weeks’s relative roles in Ryan’s life, but to Pettine, this was purely about staff morale and the principle. Principle was what Pettine most liked about defensive football. The game was direct, tough, and bound by a ligature of rules and plans that felt like ethics to him. He thought he would have to speak to Ryan about the situation, a prospect he did not relish but did not fear. He planned to do so after the Chiefs game. “Monday will be a big day,” he said.
Friday’s was a lighthearted practice. Sanchez entertained the quarterbacks during their morning meeting with an imitation of Tom Moore’s deep, quavery Southern voice. Out at practice, Westhoff was wearing heavy boots rather than the usual sneakers, and Joe McKnight was concerned. “Sutt!” he told Sutton. “You got to do something about Coach Westhoff. He’s wearing some Rocky Mountain boots. You got to, Coach! Swag him up!”
Cro reported that he’d been doing extra lifting and suddenly was feeling healthier. So was Leonhard. Last year’s leg injury fully healed, he was playing, as Ryan noticed, “really well.”
On Saturday morning, a Daily News article appeared portraying Smitty as the intern who was the secret to Maybin’s success. “Without him I’d probably be a fish without fins in the open sea,” Maybin said. To the defense, Pettine praised the offense’s week of practice: “They did a nice job and so did you.”
Tim Tebow had continued to win games for Denver, and around the building he was a topic of conversation. Ryan thought Tebow’s sui generis national popularity had to do with personality: “Tebow’s a straight arrow. The boy next door. The kid you want your daughter to marry. He’s still a virgin!” Sutton said that the importance of Tebow’s religion to his fellow Christians could not be overstated, and neither could the importance of his narrative, the person everybody said couldn’t succeed in the NFL doing just that. People liked the many improbabilities in Tebow’s story, that he’d defied the current football trend toward multidimensional offenses with an ultra-conventional, old-school running-and-jump-passing style of play. They liked how emotional Tebow was. He got to people. That Tebow was a slow-looking, big, handsome white guy in a mostly black sport might also have had something to do with it. As for Pettine, he refused to discuss Tebow. He said the subject was still too painful.
That night at the hotel, Schotty had an entire section of calls ready if Tamba Hali was too much pass rusher for the Jets base-line protections. Pettine told the defensive players that most big plays against them were not caused by the superiority of the opponent but by Jets mistakes. In other words, they were good enough to control their fate. As usual, Ryan sat in the back of the meeting jotting down a few quick notes for his speech to the team. His oratory, like so much about him, was most effective when it came extempore. Suddenly Posey got up and left. As a rookie, his day of initiation had come, and he’d been told to try chewing tobacco. The poor fellow was now green as a can of Skoal.
DeVito and Mulligan walked into the team meeting wearing their shirt of the week. It read: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.” Romans 1:16. Ryan told the gripping story of how his old dog Winston, named for the 1960s Jets lineman Winston Hill, defea
ted all the other big dogs on his father’s Kentucky farm.
At the game-day breakfast the next morning at the hotel, Bart Scott and DT watched a TV report on baseball star Albert Pujols, who had recently signed a free-agent contract with the California Angels. “Two hundred and fifty million for five good years!” Scott exclaimed. “DT, we picked the wrong sport. That’s why I’m making sure my kids don’t make the same mistake. Soon there’s gonna be the word out. The brothers are back! And they’re stealing bases like crazy!” You could find plenty of players and coaches who weren’t sure they wanted their children to play football, but this wasn’t a subject anybody besides Scott really wanted to get into.
Ryan had urged me to spend the game this week on the sidelines rather than upstairs. “You can’t believe how big and fast and violent it is,” he said. “The collisions! It’s the difference between watching boxing on TV and standing next to a fight.” Leonhard urged the same. “There’s so much energy in a stadium on a sideline,” he said. “It’s just so cool.” So in the locker room I put on the required khakis and, because it was December, a green Jets parka and a green Jets wool hat.
The game began inauspiciously. Sanchez was forced to call a time-out before the first play, when only ten guys showed up in the huddle. The fullback John Conner had gone missing. That head-scratcher aside, I was impressed by how orderly everything was. There were no defensive penalties and not a single group personnel error. From the practice sidelines, I was used to the violence of the contact and to the trash talk. Here they all stood together but existed in efficiently separated little worlds. There was a Rashomon quality to how differently everyone experienced much that went on in football. The daily interactions and even the games had alternate versions for the various players and various coaches. When the defense was on the field, Cavanaugh and the quarterbacks studied still photographs of the just-completed series of plays, and they could have been in Marina del Rey, so oblivious were they to what everyone else was doing. They didn’t for instance watch Jim Leonhard’s interception or notice that he failed to get up afterward. I could see the safety clearly, his face drawn, slush-colored with pain. Leonhard looked younger and smaller even than usual. He’d ruptured a tendon, and for the second consecutive year he was lost for the season. Out on the field Revis was very upset. “Both years at crucial times,” he said he was thinking.
At halftime the Jets had gained nearly two hundred and fifty total yards and allowed four. The Chiefs offensive stat sheet showed one first down. “Keep your feet on the gas,” Pettine told the defense. “Don’t let them leave with any dignity.” Ryan reminded everyone that they were “the big dog!” The final score was 37–10. Sanchez threw for two touchdowns, ran for two, and was cheered. So was Brunell, who got into the game. Tamba Hali did not require an extra layer of protection. The Jets were now one game ahead in the standings for the last AFC playoff spot. Afterward, in the parking lot, Pettine smoked an enormous cigar but said, “I’m sick about Jimmy Leonhard. I can’t enjoy this because of it.”
Thirteen
FOOTBALL IS MY FATHER
God, it’s so painful, something that’s so close, is still so far out of reach.
—Tom Petty, “American Girl”
The Monday-morning defensive coaches’ film session offered those football cinephiles a little dark art-house escapism starring Jim Leonhard. There stood the little big man reborn, playing traffic patrolman as he organized the defensive crosswalks, acting as the cavalry as he arrived at full gallop to fill in for the positioning oversights of others, and then, finally, appearing as a last-stand martyr, making the interception, only to be done in by such a blue-moon injury none of the coaches could figure out from the film what had happened to him on the fatal play.
The Chiefs quarterback Tyler Palko said after Sunday’s game that with so many Jets defenders in motion, he’d felt as though there were thirteen opponents out there against him. With BT and Leonhard absent, the Jets coaches had now lost the two smart players who allowed them to exert this maelstrom of looks and calls. And with Eric Smith gimpy at the knee, Pettine worried that the team wouldn’t have enough back-end speed left to cover the Eagles whippet receiver DeSean Jackson on Sunday.
To Sutton, Leonhard was “a perfect last line of defense. He’s also got character. This team has lost a lot of character.” Sutton, like many others, believed the ongoing problems with the receivers never would have happened with Cotchery in the receivers’ room. Burress often seemed disaffected; he didn’t have to say a word for everyone to know when he wasn’t getting the ball. Sutton was also sad that Leonhard, not especially fast to begin with and now grounded with leg injuries in consecutive seasons, wouldn’t get the set-for-life Eric Weddle contract he’d been waiting for. Last season, when the Jets lost Leonhard on a Thursday, it stung the team and they’d been defeated on Monday night by the Patriots, 45–3, and then lost their next two games. This year, Sutton thought, they’d miss him again.
The beginning of the NFL year meant hope for every team, but the end of the season left plenty of bodies in the spillway. That afternoon, as both senior coaching sides were getting ready to sit down together in a meeting room, word came that the Chiefs had fired their head coach, Todd Haley. In photographs of Haley from Sunday, his hair was scraggly, his face was lined and sallow, his eyes blank. The year before, the Chiefs had been 11 and 5, had made the playoffs. Now, said Pettine to the other coaches, “He walked into the GM’s office and there was a plastic sheet on the floor.” Callahan nodded. “Hard league,” he said. “I got fired the year after I went to the Super Bowl.”
Pettine suggested that Ryan award a game ball to Cromartie. Then he returned to his office. “I’m tired of being tired,” he said. The younger coaches had taken to snapping photographs with their mobile phones of any fellow coach who fell asleep at his desk or while eating a meal.
The next morning, a front-office assistant toured the senior facility offices, removed Leonhard’s name from the depth charts, and put in its place a card for Gerald Alexander, a journeyman safety. It was going to be O’Neil’s job to teach Alexander the Jets defense. There was also the Eagles game plan to be written. O’Neil was trying to organize his time. How long would Alexander remain a Jet? How much course work could he master by Sunday? The moment could have felt futile; Leonhard had run the defense. But the coaches talked often of how in every football crisis there was opportunity. Sometimes it was just more difficult to see what that might be. They checked Alexander’s Wonderlic test score. Twenty-five, they discovered. Alexander the Wise! “Good!” said Pettine. Scott Cohen, Tannenbaum’s deputy, stopped in. O’Neil asked him how serious an addition Alexander was. “Full speed until you hear otherwise,” Cohen told him. “Of course, he barely passed his physical.”
“What’s the problem?” O’Neil wanted to know.
“Heart.”
“It’s just a muscle,” Pettine said.
“Great,” mused O’Neil. “I’ll make him a four-page tip sheet and you guys’ll cut him!”
Cohen was a person all the coaches liked because he was a hardworking straight shooter who revered football information. Even Cohen’s son knew the forty-yard-dash times for dozens of college prospects. Cohen’s son was ten years old.
The game plan amounted to one long conversation about how to force Eagles left-handed quarterback Michael Vick to his right. Vick had become so infamous for sponsoring dogfights that people who knew nothing about football could nonetheless name him as the torturer of pit bulls. In his prime, Vick had played football like Tim Tebow even before there was a Tebow, only Vick had been a far more electric runner and thrower. “The only person I’ve ever seen who could win a football game by himself was Michael Vick in his heyday,” said Calvin Pace. Vick had run for more yards than any quarterback in NFL history. For the Eagles game, Pettine wanted to design a cup to contain Vick and then create what Vick would think was a crack in the cup but that was really a way to funnel Vick rightward for the pursui
t to find him. “He can be ridiculously accurate,” Pettine said, “but with pressure in his face, he isn’t very accurate, and on the run to his right he’s less accurate.” The new trap for Vick they named Pit Bull Bonus. The ensuing conversation about the full-call inventory in this first week without Jim Leonhard featured many sentences that began “How about…” followed by many that ended “we can’t run it.”
The offense would face its first four-down-linemen, three-linebackers formation since the second week of the season. Schotty told the quarterbacks on Wednesday that for the Eagles, “one of the benefits of having a line coach as D-coordinator is he understands protection.”
Tom Moore looked at Sanchez and proposed a Peyton Manning–style special-review session. “Mark!” he said. “Seven o’clock Friday morning.”
“Yikes!” said Sanchez.
“It’s good luck,” Moore explained.
“We don’t need luck if we work hard enough,” Sanchez said reflexively. Then he told Moore, “I’ll be there.”
McElroy delivered Schotty’s standard six-egg sausage-and-cheese omelet to Sanchez and Sanchez’s vegetable-filled omelet to Schotty. Schotty looked horrified: “Dude!” he told McElroy. “I almost ate spinach. That’s a concern.”
The Eagles were among the more talented teams in the league, but they had played poorly and were 5 and 8. Several times Schotty and Sanchez described them as a “selfish” team, and the way both said it made it clear that there was no more despicable quality in football.
In the defensive meeting, Gerald Alexander sat in his seat listening to Pettine describe Vick as the “most explosive athlete we’ll face at quarterback.” The coordinator said that there would be a “big street-ball element,” because no NFL player was better at darting around making free runners miss. So mesmerizing were the quarterback’s improvisations that players got caught up in watching him, allowing receivers to slip into the open, and then Vick would throw to them.
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